


get out as early as you can

by writing_good_vibes



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24224659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writing_good_vibes/pseuds/writing_good_vibes
Summary: They've come so far, it is nice to know that the world is quiet here, at the end.Someone finally swallows their pride and gives the Baudalaire orphans some answers.
Relationships: Count Olaf (A Series of Unfortunate Events)/Original Character(s), Count Olaf/Kit Snicket
Kudos: 9





	1. things aren't going great for me

**Author's Note:**

> okay so i may or may not make up some of the vfd backstory, because this is my story. basically count olaf married another vfd member after he and kit broke up. she stayed with him ever since and survives till The End. she is the last one left with the baudelaires.

They'd almost forgotten about her, but the sound of Kit's pained screams drew her inland from the beach, up to the linen draped huts. 

"Give her some space," Huldah said firmly. 

"Why would we trust you to be anywhere near Kit?" Klaus asked turning to look at her, his voice rising with the stress he was under. 

"You're just kids," Huldah said, shouldering past them to kneel before Kit, who kept her eyes closed, "Yeah you've been through a lot, but this is serious, delivering a baby is dangerous business."

"Please," Kit muttered, "Please Baudelaires, just let her help..."

Klaus and Violet looked at each other, frowning with concern, but as neither of them had any experience with child birth, they reluctantly allowed Huldah to take the lead, instead settling on either side of Kit, her hands squeezing theirs tightly with every contraction. 

In just under two hours, the five lives in the hut became six, the newest beginning to wail, announcing itself loudly into the quiet world. 

Through tears Kit smiled. Her face was blotchy, her dress soaked with sweat and stained with blood, "Thank you," She mumbled, grasping at Huldah's hand. 

Huldah's eyes welled up, but she blinked back the tears before they could fall. Her voice was right and it clenched harshly as she replied, "She's beautiful. I'm sorry." 

In just under an hour, the six lives in the hut became five once more.

Huldah backed out of the hut slowly. Klaus was cradling baby Beatrice in his arms, as all three Baudelaires fell forward to weep. She hated herself for resenting this moment. She bled back into the shadows. 

Finding her way back down the beach in the dark, a pale moon shining pale light on the white sand, Huldah allowed the tears that blurred her vision to spill down her cheeks in heavy streams. Olaf's body was cold when she returned to it, clasping the stiff fingers of his corpse in her bloodstained palms. He wasn't a good man, she shouldn't have been surprised. 

The world was quiet, but for the rhythmic swelling of the tide. Huldah lay back, the sand soft and cool against her back. The cosmos twinkled above her, she tried to connect the constellations but couldn't extend her gaze past the beauty of each individual star. Eventually, her lids grew too heavy to keep open, and the feeling of Olaf's hand grew distant. 

***

The morning sun burned her lids as it crept back into the sky from the horizon. Huldah sat up, her back stiff from months on the lam. She looked at Olaf. His face was slack and empty. She supposed she should bury him, if only to stop the wild animals (if there were any animals, surely if there had been animals, those islanders might have expanded their menu beyond raw fish?) of the island from seeing him as an easy meal. 

It took her a few hours to dig a deep enough hole. Without much ceremony Huldah heaved her husband's body by the arm pits towards the grave. He landed with a soft thump. Looking down at him, Huldah saw the end. The end of him, and her, and VFD, and everything her life had been. 

"It was good, while it lasted, but now you'll have to rot alone," she sighed. Her wedding ring, tarnished with the evidence of everything they had done over the years, was still on her finger.

That afternoon she sat and stared at the sea. She'd being staring a lot since they shipwrecked on this island. She closed her eyes.

***

A shadow passed over her vision. The orphans.

"What?" Huldah asked, cracking one eye open. The orphans, including their newest addition, were stood before her, their robes were ill-fitting and dragged in the sand. Sunny held out a coconut shell full of water, fresh water. 

"We buried Kit." Viplet hesitated for a moment, "Next to Count Olaf."

Huldah almost laughs, taking the water from Sunny indifferently, "Olaf. We've been through too much together to still be using formalities."

"He ruined our lives!" Klaus retorted, "We have no reason to be friendly now."

Huldah half-shrugged and half-nodded, he had a point. She couldn't expect these children, these orphans, that they had pursued for so long, to let it all go. Even if they were stranded together at the end of it all. 

"I always liked Kit. There was something about her, she saw things that other people didn't."

"She was very noble," Violet added, although it hadn't been what Huldah meant.

"No one is noble through and through. We all just do the best we can, with our secrets and our feelings and our dilemmas," Huldah tried to explain. Tried to explain something that was never really explained to her, something she and Olaf had only begun to think about in the days and weeks and months of darkness that followed the night at the opera.

"VFD was a noble cause! Ishmael wanted it to be noble, but people like Count Olaf chose to cause trouble, chose to be wicked instead." Violet insisted. She sounded so convinced. She sounded like they had, all those years ago.

Huldah realised something, "Wait. Ishmael?"

"Yes? He told us, the night before Decision Day, he told us how he founded VFD, how he recruited our parents and the Snickets. And Olaf." 

"Ishmael? Ishmael was just our Principle at Prufrock." Huldah laughed. Not maliciously. It was far from the villainous laugh that Olaf had so often cackled with. It was almost unintentional the way it sputtered from her lips, "Honestly I think he was recruited, the same way the rest of us were. Maybe they let him think he was more important than he really was."

"Who?" Klaus enquired, "What do you mean, Ishmael got recruited?"

"I don't really know _who_ founded VFD. I know that the Man-with-a-Beard-but-No-Hair and the Woman-with-Hair-but-No-Beard had been involved long before Ishmael ever was. Maybe they were on the Fire fighting side once, but I know they were pivotal to the downfall after the schism."

Sunny made a babbling noise that Violet translated into English, "What my sister means is, 'why should we believe anything you tell us?' and I agree with her assessment. Why should we believe you? You were a villain who continously helped Count Olaf try to steal our fortune." 

Huldah smirked, her eyes sore from sand, her skin raw from the blazing sun; she was tired, "Because, if you hadn't noticed, things aren't going too well for me. My husband died after being shot with a harpoon, his last words were used to recite a love poem with his ex-girlfriend and I am now stuck on a desert island with the orphans whose fortune I've aided in trying to steal for almost a year. Why would I bother lying to you now?"

The Baudelaires looked at one another. They had every reason to distrust Huldah, to resent her. She had lied and tormented and aided in criminal activity left, right and centre. But they were shipwrecked on a desert island. They had no hope of returning to the mainland anytime soon. She really had no reason to lie.

"I think," Huldah continued, "After all this time, and now that we literally have all the time in the world, you deserve to know the truth. You've been in the dark all this time and everyone has been too selfish, too wrapped up in their own personal feuds, to give you the answers you want. I may as well tell you about VFD. The definitive truth."


	2. vfd isn't half as important as they thought they were

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> even more artistic licence taken re: backstory

It was already midday. A blazing sun beat down onto the bleached beach. Huldah stood up, her legs shaking with the effort, and headed for the tree line. The Baudelaire orphans followed her, stumbling in their robes over the shifting sand.

Huldah sat down heavily in the shade, gesturing for the children to sit down as well. Violet sat down with Sunny, and took Baby Beatrice in her arms while Klaus knelt down to join the four of them.

When they were gathered, Violet said, “Why did you leave VFD?”

“Because I was in love,” Huldah sniggered, almost ruefully, “Or I thought I was. Or I was in love with an idea. Or a lot happened, in a short amount of time, and I had to make a decision.”

Sunny made a series of inquisitive noises and Klaus asked, both in translation and to feed his own curiosity, “You were in love? With Count Olaf? But he was a villainous criminal!”

Huldah laughed, once again. She’d laughed a surprising amount since washing up here. “We were young and impulsive. Olaf wasn’t –” she paused, her throat tightening, “He wasn’t a villain. We were, like, seventeen.”

Staring down at her hands, sand clinging beneath her nails, Huldah thought back to the year her life changed, all that time ago. Changed so drastically that she never even returned to her family home. 15 years ago, it didn’t seem that long.

“Seventeen?” Violet repeated, confusion evident in her voice, “That’s only three years older than I am.”

“Yeah, we were just reckless kids. You don’t understand – though maybe you do now – how much pressure VFD put on their recruits.”

“But what happened? What pushed you away?”

“VFD, and please don’t over react, is not as noble as you think it is. It started honourably, almost, but egos took over. I guess it was Ishmael’s job to recruit clever kids with low self-esteems, or big bank accounts,” Huldah thought about how young and eager and sharp they used to be. All of them. Ishmael had a way of making them feel like they were genius’, that if they read _Catcher in the Rye_ enough times and memorised enough passages of _Paradise Lost_ that they might be able to conquer all evil. He conveniently left out that the best villains in the world could recite Shakespeare by heart.

“Is that how you got recruited? Because you were clever?” said Klaus.

“They’ll say that I was clever, yeah. I learnt quickly, knew things more innately than other kids my age did. Olaf was quick-witted, he was brilliant at codes and puzzles. And he was rich.”

Violet let out a choked laugh, “If he were so rich, why did he spend almost a year hunting us down to steal our fortune? Why did he kill our parents to get it?”

Huldah shook her head. It was hard to answer questions you didn’t know the answer to. So many of the things she did with Olaf were because she had nothing else to do, because being alone with him for so long had changed how she looked at things.

“We did _not_ kill your parents. We wanted to get guardianship of you kids because we needed some easy money. And we’d been alone for so long that we lost our way, when VFD left us with nothing.”

The orphans looked at her intently, wait for her to continue. Although she hadn’t thought about those by-gone days in such a long time, she often felt like they’d never really grown up after that. They’d lived in the same towering house until it became dilapidated. They slept in the same room until the furnishings became worn and frayed. They lounged and roamed and paced the rooms for the past fifteen years. Where else were they meant to go?

“I promised I’d start at the beginning, so I’m not going to jump ahead and justify anything until I have to,” Huldah finally said, bringing herself back to the present and trying to keep it together. She wasn’t going to lose her cool in front of these kids.

“So, as I was saying, we got recruited, along with your parents and the Snickets. We all felt so _special_ , learning all about art and poetry and espionage. How to ‘keep the world safe’, they told us. What we actually did was quite boring, it didn’t really help anyone but ourselves.”

She could see that the Baudelaires were about to interject, but she held them off.

“I know you’ll disagree, but when has any of this ever involved anyone outside of VFD? All you’ve done is bounce from one member to another. VFD are far less important than they liked to think they were.

“But we went along with it. Because we thought this was our chance to be something, to be someone. Most of our missions were just toing and froing between the older members, passing around information, until the night at the opera. You see, Olaf and I were friends before we even started at Prufrock, our parents had been in the same year as Ishmael when _he_ was at Prufrock. We’d been best friends since before we could walk or talk. When we were fifteen, the same age as you Violet, Kit and Olaf started going out. I was happy for them, the whole thing was so sweet, but as time passed, it was clear that VFD was picking favourites. And Kit was one of them.

“By the time we were seventeen, Olaf and I got the feeling we weren’t as important as they’d kept hoodwinking us into thinking. My best guess is that the nasty business at the Opera that night was her initiation.”

There was a pause as Huldah waited for a reaction. Although she had nothing left to lose, she did want to savour the look of revelation on the orphans’ cherub faces.

Sunny babbled. Klaus translated, “Whose initiation?”

Huldah smirked, “Your mother’s.”


	3. was he much nicer back then?

The Baudelaires looked at her in disbelief.

“That’s what VFD did. With their favourites anyway. They gave them these tasks, tasks that any teenager would be out of their depth in, and if you did what you were told, you were promoted to the higher ranks.”

Huldah took another drink of water from the coconut that she had been neglecting. It had gotten lukewarm just by being on the island. A constant heat enveloped anyone and anything on the beach.

Violet shook her head, not quite as fiercely as Huldah had anticipated, “Our mother wouldn’t have done anything that as wrong, not even for VFD—”

“VFD wouldn’t ask children to do anything immoral anyway” Klaus cut in, then added, uncertainly, “Would they?”

“Oh, they would,” Huldah quirked an eyebrow, “Do you really think you can stop villains with pacifism?”

The look on the Baudelaire’s faces was priceless, but in the back of her mind, Huldah wondered if this was the right thing to do. Over 15 years she hadn’t often done the right thing, and now she thought, was it really in her to see these children so disillusioned? But she had made a promise, she wasn’t going to deny the truth to these kids who’d been strung along for months on end. Their disillusionment would come in a much fairer way than her own had.

“Anyway, there’s still a lot to get through. Your mother was being initiated. Beatrice was the most determined person I’ve ever met. She was self-confident, but without an ego like Jacques. She was thoughtful without the cynicism of Lemony. She was cunning, without being malicious. Well, mostly unmalicious. I assume you know what malicious means?” She quickly asked. She knew the answer.

“We do.” Klaus answered, quietly.

“I didn’t think she was malicious. But we were at the opera one night, much like Esme already told you at our trial, and her and your mother had had an argument after the second act. About something petty. Esme was pretty far down the favourites list, but her parents had snagged her some extra responsibilities.”

“Looking after the sugar bowl?”

“Exactly. She was in charge of it, but Beatrice and Bertrand, as well as the Snickets, didn’t trust her. Not through any fault of her own really, they just thought she was a ditz.” Huldah laughed, “she was far cleverer than anyone likes to admit.”

The heat was beginning to get to Huldah, she wiped her sleeve across her forehead before the sweat on her brow could trickle into her eyes.

She continued, “So, I knew something was going. I didn’t know what, but there was clearly something going on with Beatrice, she was so sharp with Esme that night, which was very unusual.

“And then it all went wrong.” Huldah looked down at her hands, twisting the blemished gold ring on her left hand. She hasn’t thought about this properly in years, but an image of Olaf’s face crossed her vision, the utter shock that she has never seen on someone else.

“I’ll be honest Baudelaires, I promised you honesty, I don’t know everything. I don’t fully know what happened that night. But what I know for certain is that Kit gave your mother poison darts, and Olaf’s dad ended up dead.”

Even in the shade of the trees, the heat of unrelenting. Huldah looked up, expecting to see three pairs of eyes staring back. The Baudelaires had shining red noses, the light burn spreading to their cheeks. They didn’t meet her eyes. Baby Beatrice was getting restless, her little fists clenched, shifting uncomfortably in the makeshift sling.

“I don’t know if it was part of the plan to kill Olaf’s father. Beatrice did look awfully shocked, but maybe the weight of the act had only just hit her in that moment. Hit her that she couldn’t take back what she had done.

“Olaf was obviously devastated, he had to get away for a while, asked me to come with him, and I had to decide if I would. I didn’t know this at the time, but whatever I decided would change my life, literally forever.

“We went down to the tunnels, the ones that connect the VFD bases, and we wandered, for months. We hid when anyone came looking for us.”

The endless night of the tunnels made her delirious. Olaf howled and screamed into the darkness. She stumbled along beside him. Every so often he’d cry, which made her own eyes well with tears. _What were they going to do?_ One day, the Woman-with-Hair-But-no-Beard and the Man-with-a-Beard-But-no-Hair found them, offered their help. Olaf was intrigued, he’d never much been into the philanthropy that VFD loved to parade around as their core value, and the moderately open arms of the Fire Starters were a welcoming sight after the utter disillusionment that had occurred just a few months prior.

Huldah explained this as best as she could to the orphan, knowing that it sounded like an excuse, like the blame wasn’t entirely on her for this mess.

“But why would turning to crime make everything better?” Violet asked, her face screwing up slightly in anguish.

“It didn’t,” Huldah sighed. “But everyone reacts differently, his dad was the only family Olaf had left.”

Sunny babbled angrily, Klaus elucidated, “What Sunny means is ‘the exact same thing happened to us, we lost out entire family, and we never wanted to turn to crime’!”

“All I can tell you is what happened!” Huldah snapped, what was she meant to do? Her entire life had been wasted away in the peeling walls of an Old Money mansion, with too much wine and not enough company. It had been the two of them for so long, they thought they didn’t need anything else. “Now do you want to know the rest of what happened to us or not?”

The children looked at her, scowling, but nodded firmly. Violet passed Baby Beatrice to Klaus in order to try and settle her. They unwrapped the layer of the sling and sat her up a bit straighter. Sunny reach over and held her chubby hand.

“While we were hiding out, we both had our birthdays. We were 18, adults, out on our own in the world.” Huldah paused then added wistfully, a hint of disbelief in her voice even now, “He asked me to marry him. And I said yes.”

She looked down at her ring again. It had been one of Olaf’s family heirlooms, sat gathering dust in a jewellery box in the master bedroom. It probably wasn’t a real wedding ring, but as soon as she saw it, she knew it was the perfect fit for their ramshackle marriage.

“Was he much nicer back then or something?” Klaus said sarcastically, raising his eyebrows. Violet tried to stifle a giggle.

“I suppose he was. And he as my best friend, and I wanted to be with him. We headed out the tunnels and stopped only at the registry office to get married. Then we went straight to his mansion. With both his parents gone, we took the titles of Count and Countess, and had free reign of the house and the fortune.”

“And you spent it all?”

“It took us a few years, but the money did eventually dwindle away. We spent most our time drinking, smoking, reading. Setting fires.” Huldah said, she could feel her throat getting tighter, “I wrote to my parents every so often, but I never went back home.”

Sunny’s babble was identifiable as a single word, “Never?”

“Never.”


End file.
